Why and when does the SPSO publish reports?

At the end of our investigation we will tell you our decision. We will also send the decision to the organisation you complained about and we are likely to publish information about it. We do this in order to share learning from the complaint, to help public services improve. We publish our decisions in two types of report.

Public decision report

This is a summary of a decision letter. We send these reports to the Parliament and Scottish Ministers and publish them on our website and sometimes in other forms of communication like newsletters. We usually publish decision reports about six weeks after making our decision. In a small number of cases we do not publish decision reports, usually to prevent the possibility of someone being identified. For the same reason we sometimes we publish the report, and anonymise the organisation complained about (for example, we call the organisation A Council).

If you have requested a review of your decision, we will not publish the decision report until the review is complete.

Public detailed investigation report

This is a detailed report, usually where a case has a wider public interest. We send these reports to the Parliament and Scottish Ministers and publish them on our website and in other forms of communication like newsletters. We publish these reports at the same time as giving them to the people involved in the complaint. 

Updated: April 20, 2018